As the Internet increasing influences society, and products and services increasingly are managed and accessed online, the importance and value of digital information that records these activities increases. The aggregation, cleaning and enriching of data from many different sources is providing new opportunities, both commercial (e.g. in the travel industry for planning trips across multiple services) and non-commercial (e.g. in health care, in planning and finding care providers). These opportunities are shaping what people have dubbed a new "data economy".

Sharing and combining data between different organizations on the internet calls for standards that make the exchange of information possible, by allowing data publishers and data consumers to identify concepts with standard names. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) founded by Tim Berners Lee, which developed the Internet standards (e.g., HTML) has proposed the most comprehensive standard for such data sharing on the internet, namely the Resource Description Framework (RDF). To query data in RDF, W3C has developed a query language called SPARQL. Increasingly, HTML pages contain embedded RDF, for instance in the RDFa format, adding more meaning to information in the HTML, gradually realizing Berners Lee's vision of a Semantic Web.

RDF in essence is a data model for labeled directed graphs; it consists of triples of the form: (subject,property,object). A triple represents an arrow with a name (the property) from one point (the subject) to the other (the object). Many such points and arrows together form a graph. RDF allows to represent data without prior agreement on the structure of the graph (its "schema"). As such, it is a good basis for sharing data on the internet. Increasingly, the Linked Open Data movement has been publishing open data from a multitude of sources in the RDF format.

Governments and businesses are increasingly adopting RDF to represent their data, especially where data sharing is important. Example areas where this is done is in publishing and health care and bio-informatics. This increasing adoption of RDF has been accompanied by an increasingly wider range of technological solutions that can be used to store data in RDF and query it with SPARQL. It is the mission of LDBC to help organizations make technological decisions among these RDF and SPARQL tools, as well as help the tool developers and vendors improve their products.